Michigan GOP ponders getting in on some sweet electoral college rigging action'or not

Republican efforts to rig the electoral college to squeeze a few more Republican electors from a steadily dwindling base have been having problems in Virginia, Ohio, and Florida, but last week Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger said he might be willing to give it the ol' (electoral) college try in his state. And the justification remained the same: Our rural Republican folks just feel so bad about people in the big Democratic-leaning cities getting to vote too, since there's so darn many of them and all:

'I hear that more and more from our citizens in various parts of the state of Michigan that they don't feel like their vote for president counts because another area of the state may dominate that or could sway their vote,' Bolger told Gongwer. 'They feel closer to voting for their congressman or their congresswoman and if that vote coincided with their vote for president they would feel better about that.'

Those darn city folks, what with not voting the way good Republicans ought! It's enough to make a person want to go out and change the rules so that the city folks just don't have as much say in things anymore.

You will note, I hope, that if a Republican feels their vote "doesn't count" because a larger number of people voting the other way will, indeed, result in the larger number of people winning, then maybe the Republicans involved do not actually know what the hell an "election" is. Yes, the person who gets the most votes wins. This is often very sad, if you are on the losing side, but you have to be a special kind of, well, dumbass to then propose that more-votes-winning-over-fewer-votes is some sort of inherent unfairness in the system.

As in other states, however, the Michigan effort may already be doomed:

The state House may be considering a new and controversial plan on how Michigan's electoral college votes are distributed, but the state Senate isn't interested, said Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville.

"I don't know that the system now is broken. So I don't know that we need to fix it," he said.

What's curious is that we're finally at a point, technologically, where doing away with the electoral college and basing election results entirely on the popular vote would be an accomplishable thing. It would have its own set of consequences, to be sure, but it would effectively render every citizen's vote exactly equal, in presidential elections'which is the sort of thing we used to hurrah for as being a noble American ideal. The new obsession over cranking the electoral college rules in the opposite direction, then, seems especially oddly timed. We obviously wouldn't be talking about it right now if Republicans hadn't had such success gerrymandering congressional districts that they can maintain a congressional edge even when the raw popular votes go the other direction; still, it seems such a stunningly short-term gimmick that you have to wonder about the people so enamored with it.

So far, though, most of these state efforts have proven to be busts, since not all Republicans are keen on pinning themselves to such an obviously silly effort. Awkward, GOP-humiliating busts, which is exactly the sort of thing you might expect to see from the plan's national mastermind, still-RNC-head Reince Priebus. Priebus, for the record, has managed to stay in his job long enough for me to remember how to spell his name without looking it up, which means I lose a bet.